Small business news

Weekend Favs February Four

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or from my own travels.

First run of the day Telluride

Good stuff I found this week:

Quipol – Easily create and embed social polls that are very easy to use and very good looking

Transcribe – free online tool that makes it much easier to transcribe an audio – type and listen in the same place and keyboard shortcuts let you slow the audio down and skip around.

SocialBro – Great piece of software that allows you analyze and manage your Twitter following, including the best times to Tweet when your following are on Twitter.

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BOSTON (Reuters) - Being culturally fluent means being able to enter a new context, master the norms, and feel comfortable doing so, says Harvard Business Review.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months in January and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to a near three-year low, giving a boost to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months in January and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to a near three-year low, giving a boost to...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of planned layoffs at U.S. firms surged in January to its highest level in four months as retailers and financial firms cut jobs, a report on Thursday showed.

(Reuters) - Small business hiring was flat in January, a poll released on Friday showed, slightly better than the previous month's reading but still far from levels consistent with strong employment...

BOSTON (Reuters) - You cannot find truth through analysis but only through action, says Harvard Business Review, so start working it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New claims for unemployment benefits in the United States fell more than expected last week, pointing to further healing in the nation's battered jobs market.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Babson College and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor recently released the results of a comprehensive 2010 study about women's entrepreneurship around the world.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Working mom Jessica Alba is adding entrepreneur to her many titles, shifting from movie star to businesswoman with a venture that provides parents easy access to eco-friendly...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. solar industry group fighting a rival coalition's request for steep import duties on Chinese-made solar cells and modules warned in a report on Monday that more than...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of planned layoffs at U.S. firms surged in January to its highest level in four months as retailers and financial firms cut jobs, a report on Thursday showed.

BOSTON, Feb 1 Reuters) - Simple, no-cost managerial actions can do much to improve the engagement of the estimated 48 percent of workers who today feel undervaluedsays Harvard Business Review.

WASHINGTON, DC (Reuters) - An advisory committee urged U.S. securities regulators on Wednesday to relax outdated rules that trigger public financial reporting for companies, but it stopped short of...

CHICAGO - Borrowing by U.S. small businesses rose in December to the highest level in more than four years, pointing to continued strength in an important corner of the economy.

Does Your Marketing Make the Grade

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Laura Fitton (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

A number of years ago Hubspot created something called the Website Grader, a tool that graded a number of important aspects about a website and concocted a score or grade based on those factors.

Although no tool can really accurately measure the effectiveness of a website, the tool had a nice marketing bent to it and was a pretty simple way to help someone understand the most important elements of their site.

About a month ago Hubspot upped the game and came out with what they are calling Marketing Grader. The tool still focuses on your website, but it also considers a number of offsite considerations that have a great deal to do with success on the web these days.

Things like Facebook, Klout and Twitter use are considered and the overall integration of social in general. Again, no tool will ever be perfect, but I highly recommend running your site through this tool.

The report it produces breaks your grade into three topics – top of the funnel – what you’re to attract visitors, middle – what you’re doing to convert that traffic, and analytics – what you’re doing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

In addition to simply grading your site, you’ll be offered action items for things that need attention and every element measured comes with a handy tip that talks about best practices for the item. Simply going through and reading those tips would be beneficial for many people.

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Hubspot’s Inbound Markeitng Evangelist Laura Fitton. Fitton, who some may know as @Pistachio, does a great job in this interview explaining the ins and out of the Marketing Grader.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Employment growth probably slowed in January as messengers hired during the busy holiday shopping season were laid off, but the improving labor market trend should remain...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sought on Tuesday to revive a plan to give small businesses tax breaks and help start-up firms, ideas he proposed over the last year and which will...

What Say You About Scheduled Tweets

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Yesterday’s post about using a tool called Buffer to schedule Tweets throughout the day had some folks cheering and some folks suggesting that scheduled Tweets ruined the conversation on Twitter and were kind of bot like.

What’s your thinking on this. Take the quick poll and leave your two cents in the comments if you like.

Quipol
Image: born1945 via FlickrCC

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(Reuters) - Former Groupon Inc sales representatives who were sued by that company after deciding to leave for Google Inc have filed a countersuit, claiming their former employer is pursuing "sham"...